ARTWORK | BIOGRAPHY

Sheridan wright

Photography


Sheridan Wright is an American photographer known for capturing both traditional cultures and the natural world in heightened states of reality. Having traveled across Asia and Africa as a relief worker throughout his adolescence, Wright’s work is inspired by a unique worldview formed by being a perennial foreigner amongst natives. As the camera lens became Wright’s instrument for processing that which was unfamiliar, he honed a signature, diorama-like style of framing to bring a sense of order to an otherwise chaotic world. Between 2015 and 2016, he produced a two-part series in Kyoto, Japan, first capturing street portraits of maikos and geishas in their quotidian lives, and then using post-production techniques to place these traditional figures in modern Japanese settings. The result is a striking and fantastical merging of the past with the present, the customary with the contemporary. From 2016 to 2019, Wright produced a collection of meticulously framed images of wildlife across the Serengeti. In that same period, he also created a series of intimate, intensely anthropomorphic portraits of the gravely endangered mountain gorillas in Virunga National Park. In 2019, he focused his lens back onto human subjects, capturing the lives and customs of young Maasai warriors in Tanzania. After many years of using his camera to familiarize the unfamiliar, his current series does exactly the opposite: subverting traditional beach scenes with the use of digital negatives.